Tuesday, April 14, 2015

An Actually Affordable 4K TV Series from Vizio

Until now 4K HDTVs have seemed like a luxury only fit for celebrities. The price points were extremely high and most people could have bought a car before buying a 4K TV. However, Vizio has just confirmed pricing on the M series of HDTVs and let me tell you that they are some of the cheapest 4K TVs on the market today.

In addition to that, Vizio also threw out some details on the high-end Reference series of TVs that debuted at CES 2014 without official pricing or availability. Whenever they do arrive, though, Vizio has stated that they will be the first TVs with Dolby Vision HDR.

The official prices of the M series are nearly exactly the same as the unofficial prices that were leaked about 2 months ago. The biggest exception in the released pricing over the rumored prices comes with the 50" model. This model will sell for $799 instead of the leaked price of $899. The full list is as follows:

M80-C3: 80" to be released in late 2015 for $3,999

M75-C1: 75" to be released in late 2015 for $2,999

M70-C3: 70" to be released in April-May for $2,199

M65-C1: 65" to be released in April-May for $1,699

M60-C3: 60" available now for $1,499

M55-C2: 55" available now for $999

M50-C1: 50" to be released in April-May for $799

M49-C1: 49" to be released in April-May for $769

M43-C1: 43" available now for $599

All of these 2015 M series TVs will come with the same kind of direct local dimming backlights that the 2014 versions had. This allows the TVs to have extremely impressive black level performance and all sizes have the same 32 zones of backlight dimming except for the 43" model with has 28 zones.

The 60" models and up have a 240Hz effective refresh rate with the smaller models coming with a 120Hz effective refresh rate and, since there are no native 240Hz 4K TVs, Vizio has confirmed that the "effective" title indicates that the smaller sets have 60Hz panels while the larger ones have 120Hz panels. Backlight scanning is responsible for the double Hz numbers, which means it's the same type of "fake" refresh rate that Vizio and LG have been employing for years now.

As far as connectivity is concerned, the M series will have 5 HDMI ports that will be capable of accepting 4K sources. However, only one of these ports will be HDMI 2.0 compatible and able to accept 4K sources at 60FPS. Three out of the five ports will offer HDCP 2.2 copy protection and the sets will be able to stream 4K from Netflix and Amazon Instant Video and will also come with an UltraFlix app.

This is definitely some interesting and exciting news from Vizio. 4K is the future of HDTV technology and, like all technology, adoption speed depends on pricing. It took people a long time to adopt to HDTVs when they first came out because they were so expensive. With Vizio able to slash prices on 4K TVs so quickly it definitely shows promise for the sets to be widely adopted at a much quicker rate than HDTVs.